To create a sustaining Lean organization, you lead differently. Lean leaders lead from gemba, where the action happens. They know the only way to truly understand what is happening is to go to the place[more…]

Lean is a customer-centric methodology used to continuously improve any process through the elimination of waste in everything you do; it is based on the ideas of Continuous Incremental Improvement and[more…]

The value stream includes all of the activities, materials, people, and information that must flow and come together to provide your customer the value they want, when they want it and how they want it[more…]

Money matters as much as time to your business or organization's efficiency. So many people (and organizations) sign up for recurring services and then forget about them — never noticing the small credit[more…]

You can’t improve efficiency in your business or organization if you don’t know where you stand currently. Without a starting point, you have no official idea whether the changes you implement in hopes[more…]

A great starting place for identifying inefficiencies in your business is to take baseline measurements across your organization, which you can then use like a road map to your inefficiencies. Working[more…]

It’s easy to assume you know which solution to use to address a given inefficiency problem in your business or organization, but you know what they say about assuming. A responsible efficiency-enhancing[more…]

You need to follow the steps of any business efficiency plan in order to implement change, but you also need to compose a comprehensive execution plan, before you go about implementing changes. Execution[more…]

The importance of measuring your business efficiency in ways beyond mere dollars in and dollars out cannot be overstated. In fact, Harvard Business School’s Robert Kaplan and David Norton developed the[more…]

Increasing income while decreasing expenses is what people usually think of when they hear business efficiency, although it’s never quite that simple. When you’re measuring financial milestones, always[more…]

Sentiment analysis is one of the trickiest metrics to measure, but it has far-reaching implications for business efficiency. If your customers aren’t happy, that’s usually a sign of room for improvement[more…]

Time is an often overlooked resource in business efficiency, but in many ways, it’s the most valuable one. Even if you had the money to pay every employee to work 100 hours a week, you won’t generally[more…]

Measuring how you stack up against the competition and within the marketplace can unearth potential inefficiencies in every aspect of your business. For example, if your competitors are able to sell the[more…]

When you plan a business efficiency project, you need to know what you’d like to measure and how you’d like to go about measuring it — but where does all that data go, exactly? Depending on your business[more…]

Any good business efficiency project plan will involve measuring and storing data. Do you need to invest in archiving data? Although it’s certainly possible to convert just about any existing files, whether[more…]

One part of measuring and implementing any business efficiency plan is quality. Total Quality Management, or TQM, shines the spotlight on quality. In a TQM organization, every product, marketing piece,[more…]